The province said the newly-passed Bill 17 will take away the city’s authority to enforce key parts of the Toronto Green Standard for buildings — though the city continues to deny the law will have any impact.

A spokesperson for Rob Flack, Ontario’s Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing, said in a statement that the act — which aims to speed up housing and infrastructure development by doing away with many local planning rules — would render mandatory parts of the standard unenforceable.  

“Our government’s legislation, the Protect Ontario by Building Faster and Smarter Act, standardizes construction requirements and provides consistency, clarifying that no municipality has the authority to enforce a by-law that supersedes the Ontario Building Code,” spokesperson Alexandra Sanita wrote. 

“Through these changes, the City of Toronto’s Tier 1 of the Green Building Standard would not be allowed as they mandate requirements for new development planning applications that go beyond the Ontario building code.” 

The Toronto Green Standard are a set of city rules that require housing developers to implement eco-friendly design features in new buildings. 

The standard consists of four tiers, with Tier 1 being a mandatory list of assets developers must incorporate within new developments. This includes adding bicycle parking and electric vehicle charging stations to new buildings over four storeys, and taking steps to mitigate flooding and extreme heat, for instance, by building rooftop gardens and planting trees. 

Tiers 2 through 4, while not mandatory, provide developers with financial incentives to take on more ambitious climate targets. Developers can get a portion of the development charge fees they pay to the city refunded for achieving these higher targets. 

According to the provincial spokesperson, Tiers 2 to 4 “will not be affected” by Bill 17.

City pushes back on province’s interpretation of law

Despite the province’s statement, a spokesperson for the City of Toronto denied that Bill 17 will have any impact on the municipality’s ability to enforce the Toronto Green Standard, reiterating findings from a staff report earlier this week. 

“City staff have reviewed Bill 17 and determined that there is no impact to the City’s ability to continue to apply the [standard] to new development,” the spokesperson told TorontoToday. 

Last week, the city released an assessment of the impact of Bill 17, which pushed back on the idea that local authority over the standard could be restricted. 

“Recent media reports have suggested that Bill 17 has impacted or restricted a municipalities [sic] ability to apply the [Toronto Green Standard],” the report read, going on to deny there would be any impact. 

The city’s executive committee received the report on June 16. 

Experts previously raised concerns over Bill 17

Before the bill was passed on June 3, experts speculated a provision that updates the Building Code Act of 1992 could bring an end to the Toronto Green Standard.

The provision says municipalities do not have the authority to “pass by-laws respecting the construction or demolition of buildings.” 

Some legal professionals interpreted this phrase to mean that Ontario cities would no longer have the authority to enforce sustainable design standard.

“This would appear to make green building standards obsolete and ensure that the same standard (the [Ontario Building Code]) apply province wide,” lawyers from Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP wrote in May. 

Environmental experts had also raised alarm that Toronto Green Standard would be “deeply undercut.”

Additionally, the president of an organization representing Ontario’s residential construction industry argued the law was intended to override the standard. 

“No municipality has the right to choose not to implement legislation irrespective of how unappealing it may appear to them,” Richard Lyall, president of the Residential Construction Council of Ontario, wrote in a letter to the city’s executive committee last week. 

Lyall referenced comments made by Minister Flack in the Ontario Legislature, when he spoke about the need to make building standard across the province consistent. 

“It’s bureaucratic; it’s red tape; it isn’t working,” Flack said during legislative debates in early June, adding that green standard are “part of the slowness of getting houses built.”

“That is why we brought Bill 17 forward; that is why we are going to have one code in this province, not hundreds of iterations,” Flack said.

The Residential Construction Council of Ontario is also currently engaged in a legal battle with the city over the Toronto Green Standard. In December, the industry group asked the Ontario Superior Court of Justice to block the city from enforcing construction standards that go beyond the Ontario Building Code. 

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Once you know what burdock and garlic mustard look like, you won’t stop spotting them in Toronto’s parks, according to the volunteers working to remove invasive plant species at Trinity Bellwoods Park. 

That’s exactly what happened with Shân Gordon, a local from the area who started the park’s invasive species removal campaign. She was practicing walking meditation in Trinity Bellwoods last year and couldn’t ignore the extent of the park’s burdock and garlic mustard takeover.

Gordon approached Friends of Trinity Bellwoods, a volunteer organization working to improve and maintain the park, and learned there was no coordinated effort to remove invasive plants. So, she joined the organization to lead the charge. 

With the blessing of the city’s Trinity Bellwoods park supervisor, Gordon and other volunteers have since been hard at work removing burdock and garlic mustard — two common invasive plant species in Ontario. 

Trinity Bellwoods may be mostly manicured lawn, but the area around the dog bowl — a manmade pit turned off-leash dog park — runs wild. There, burdock and garlic mustard abound.

Both plant species are edible and are popular fare among urban foragers. Toronto park bylaws prohibit foraging in city parks, but you wouldn’t want to eat the burdock or garlic mustard at Trinity Bellwoods anyway, Gordon said, due to the risk of dog waste contaminating the plants. 

During a Saturday morning stewardship event in late May, Gordon and volunteer Jo Moore demonstrated how to remove these invasive plants.

For garlic mustard, volunteers simply pull it out of the ground and discard it in a bucket. But removing burdock is a much more involved process.

Moore used a hand hoe to dig into the soil and reveal the plant’s thick roots. She then cut through the stalk with garden shears and discarded the plant on the ground to allow sunlight to kill it. 

At this point in the spring, the burdock plants don’t yet have seeds, Gordon explained, which means volunteers can leave the uprooted plants on the ground to enrich the soil. If the burdock had seeds, volunteers would place the plants in a garbage bag before leaving it out in the sun. 

In the summer, burdock generates seed heads, or burrs, which pose a risk to wildlife and the many dogs in the area. The burrs easily cling to dog fur and can cause skin irritation, paw problems and an oral condition called burr tongue. 

Dog owners often express their gratitude to the Trinity Bellwoods volunteers while they remove burdock, according to Ada Diemer, who has volunteered alongside Gordon for the past year. 

“It’s not a thankless job,” she laughed.

For songbirds and native plants, though, burdock poses a life-threatening danger. It crowds out native plants by blocking sunlight with its large leaves. Meanwhile, songbirds can become entangled in its burrs and die.

As for garlic mustard, the invasive species is known to take over forest understories by emitting chemicals into the soil that inhibit the growth of other plants. 

Eradicating invasive species isn’t a one and done deal. Consistent management over years is needed, Gordon said. 

Gordon and Diemer said they’ve noticed a difference since volunteers started removing the invasive plants last year, but there’s still a long way to go. 

Gordon estimated it would take between five and 10 years of consistent effort to completely eliminate the invasive plants from the park. “And then continued maintenance,” she said. 

The area that volunteers cleared on that May Saturday morning, south of the dog bowl, had already been cleared the year before and will likely need clearing again. 

Burdock “has such a strong, deep root that you need to just keep chipping away at it,” Diemer explained. “We’ll try to get as much of the root as we can and then it will probably still come back.”

With each removal, the burdock gets weaker and weaker, allowing native plants like the flowering goldenrod to re-establish itself. 

The problem isn’t localized to Trinity Bellwoods, the volunteers said. Every Toronto park is inundated. 

“It’s shocking how widespread it is,” Diemer said. “I would be surprised if there is any park… that doesn’t have at least one invasive species in it.”

The spread of invasive species is considered one of the greatest threats to biodiversity, second only to habitat loss, according to the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority . 

Combined, municipalities and conservation authorities across Ontario spend about $51 million annually to manage invasive species. 

To reduce the spread of invasive species, the conservation authority recommends planting native wildflowers, trees and shrubs and cleaning yourself and your gear before moving to different areas.

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